The Story of the Vampire, L (Completed | Featured )

Part 14 - Pale Lotus

When the blood from that dead lover, Aquilla, found its way into my head, and into the reaches of my body, it was as if the sun had been let in on me. There was an incredible lightness in my limbs. I sat for long hours on the floor of our room, windows uncovered, with my arms raised over my head and my eyes closed, as if at worship.

Escha spent time beautifying himself at first, checking his eyes and mouth in the hand-length silver mirror the dead man had bought for him. He had it on an enamel stand, on the table by the bed. He checked himself compulsively, fluffing his hair with my comb carved like a tiger. Because he left that room only to piss or find food, color left him, and his complexion went milky and pallid, which outward sign of suffering pleased him. He said, "Talk to me about Aquilla's death," often, wanting to hear my voice, and it would have been easy to think him freed by the death of that last human lover, but he was slavish to news of him, and of my involvement, and I ignored him, arms raised up in bloody supplication. At first, I could hear him and ignore him, but gradually the earthly plane faded from me, and so did "Faya", and the world where he existed hummed in and out of my consciousness.

That blood lasted in me long, and I listened to the murmur of the city, electric and many voices, breathing of her air. I darted out a tongue of consciousness, like a whip, searching for my other one, my singing lover, among those many bodies, but could not find him, which unsettled me, and set me to sitting longer, and not speaking. 

As winter settled in, Escha's mood darkened, turning inward. He fought to cover the windows, but he could not battle against my power, which in that time was quiet but absolute. I knocked him aside from the shutter without a touch, and turned on sounds in his head which made him gasp and drop to his knees. I calmly called for those other ancients who had known me, without names, but recieved no answer, a lone bird in an empty wood. I pointed my body in the direction of heaven, inclining my chest skyward, back bent. I closed my eyes and opened my mouth, and whispered attunement, listening for voices, but there were none but my own, echoing back to my own ears. 

Escha watched, and said, "You seem peaceful," and feared me, for which I had no care in the world. I lowered my body to the floor, face resting on the wood and arms extended, stomach flush against my knees, spine spoon-shaped, I said, "Yaksha," intimate with the earth, and heard, "Aurvha," which is an old name, and smiled. I said, "Is he living," and heard, in an old language, "There is no easy knowledge, none, lover," and the tickle of longing. "As this, your old self," he said, "someday call me as now and again ask, my sweet white throat, my young serpant, my pale lotus, ask next time for me alone, no other, for this old body wants that lucid mind," and a smile, "to drink of." And Yaksha spoke to me no more after that.

For long weeks, the world was a ghost to me, and there was only the pillar of my body, quaking and humming, at peace and in contentment with the completeness of its met needs. There was no self. There was no Faya, or Aurvha, or anyone but vampire, tasting the air and communing with spirits, flicking out its electric tongue for those it had known, seeking egress back into the world it understood, and finding no one. 

And eventually the blood faded away, and there came Faya again, with his cloudiness and loves, and worries, and the creature cried a breath and submerged itself once more, melancholy and old, inside of him. And then there was I, lying on the floor cold, in that same bloody tunic I had killed Escha's Aquilla in, and feeling the weeping of pain in my limbs at being so long held still. And I noticed that Escha had cut open his arms and lay near me, passed out from his attempt at a meaningful suicide.

I sat up, and sat over him, straightening his hips so that he lay flat on his back in his pool of blood, growing tacky with the passage of time. I lifted his head and brushed his hair back, tipped his chin up. I pressed my ear to his chest and listened to his long, slow breaths.